Topic: Video

Web Video Players – The Good the Bad and the Ugly

Sholom Sandalow, Thursday, January 8, 2009 @ 11:40 am

As I'm sure most of you do, I am spending more and more time online watching video.  So I thought I would take some time and rate the various video players I use on a frequent basis.
I'm using a 10 point scale, and I'm rating based on a both functionality and visual look and feel.

ESPN.com 7 out of 10
Fairly simple, two color, semi transparent control bar, appears only when moused over--a design pattern I'm seeing more and more lately.  It's there when you need it, it shows you what you want and it gets out of the way quickly.  It's got a single play/pause button, a timer, a playback countdown, a volume control which displays only on mouseover, reducing clutter, and a menu which when clicked brings up some additional options for embedding sharing and the like.  A nice touch: Mouse over any point on the timer and you get a little tooltip that displays the time at that point.  Another nice touch: the small (no morethan 10 pixels vertical) bar at the bottom which displays how much has already played as a portion of the total.

Youtube 7 out of 10
Gets the job done.  Period.  Simple consistent interface.  Youtube also allows publishers to add annotations and captions to their videos, and naturally allows viewers to turn either on or off, with a simple hover menu at the very right side of the control bar.  Youtube is actually doing some really cool stuff to allow publishers to make their videos more interactive, including adding hyperlinks within a movie.  The evolution of online video will be interesting to watch (and maybe take part in) but that discussion is beyond the scope of this post.

NYtimes.com 6 out of 10
Elegant interface, but could be better.  The control bar stays present throughout the video playback, and occupies a significant portion of the total video player.  However its muted style--3 shades of grey--makes it easily ignored when not needed.  The playback control is done superbly.  When moused over, a small draggable button smoothly and elegantly appears, it's affordance as a scroll mechanism to move to any point in the video is crystal clear.  The volume control is nice and large, with the same measure of affordance, however it looks like it was designed separately, as it doesn't conform to the rest
of the control bar's aesthetic.  Also, I may be nit-picky, and I'm sure this won't bother 99% of nytimes.com viewers, but there's a large empty space in between the play button on the left, and the full screen button
on the right, creating an odd asymmetry which, the more I look at it, the more it bothers me.

MTV.com 6 out of 10
Nice minimalist design.  Allows you to change the video quality during playback.  Also nice, allows you to choose from 3 sizes; standard, large and full screen.

Viddler.com 6 out of 10
Lets the video publisher skin the player interface.  This great tools allows users to comment on and tag the video in the timeline.  The interface is ugly, though, and some of the buttons aren't self explanatory, nor do any of the buttons have tooltips.  At the end of the current video it automatically plays the next video, whereas most other players present a menu of videos to choose from.

MSNBC.com 5 out of 10
Slick looking.  I like the fact that the playback bar is given the entire width of the video, allowing the viewer to be more precise in navigating to a specific point in the video.  The other controls are slightly confusing.  It looks like the interface was over designed.

Virb.com 5 out of 10

Beautifully minimalist design.  No full screen mode, but it does have a cool feature that "turns off the lights" on the rest of the page.
Facebook 5 out of 10
Fairly simple interface.  Standard controls, done adequately.  Its got none of the useful social media features of Youtube. No ability to tag or comment in the timeline.  Pretty basic for such an important part of such an important website.

Metacafe 3 out of 10
Poorly designed.  It's distracting when trying to watch video, and ugly to look at when interacting with.  The big blue shiny play and stop buttons look unprofessional, and why is there even a stop button.  The draggable playback scroll mechanism moves from left to right as the video plays, but it could have been made much more subtle.   There's no need to see it unless you want to move navigate the video.  And why does the entire playback bar glow when I mouse over it?  Also not cool is the visually loud menu underneath the control bar.

As with any list, much o this is subjective.  I'm looking forward to hearing your opinions.  Also, there are so many web video players out there, this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Let me know which ones you find especially appealing, or truly horrible.

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User Experience Design

The Problem of Encoding H.264 In a Flash Client

Anthony Caliendo, Wednesday, May 14, 2008 @ 1:01 pm

Flash Player 9 introduced the ability to decode H.264 video format.  However, it cannot encode video as H.264 (although it does encode as H.263).

This is a problem for people who want to take advantage of H.264's ability to encode at a higher quality with a lower bitrate. There are a few vendors out there who propose to offer a solution, but some of the solutions require an extra download which isn't necessarily cross platform.

With the release of AIR, Adobe seems to be targeting the Desktop market as one of their future goals. Many existing desktop applications already support H.264 encoding (see iChat for a good example).  If Adobe wants to keep up with the desktop application market, it might be prudent to add support for encoding as H.264 soon.

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Technologies and Platforms

YouTube Killed the Video Star

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, July 5, 2007 @ 6:00 am

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Just how do you mean that, sir?

Everytime I make a pronouncement about the way "the industry" is going, I feel like Mr. McGuire from the graduate -- old, pompous, irrelevant. Still, sometimes you have to call them the way you see them. So it is with the continued growth of video on the web.

To me, it looks like online video is about to do to cable and the networks what the web did (and continues to do) to newspapers around the turn of the century -- steal their customers and advertisers. There reasons for this trend are multi-factorial: cheaper and bigger bandwidth; faster laptops and internet enabled video devices; greater viewer comfort with watching content "offline," through DVR's like TiVo. These factors and the trend they drive will only continue to accelerate. Imagine a TiVo that will allow you to search, pick and record online content just as well as the "legacy" cable content.

Fake Steve has similar sentiments (if you're not familiar with the deeply tongue in cheek "diary" of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, do yourself a favor and add it to your RSS reader):

Trust me, I own one of these networks. I talk to the executives.
They're clueless pussies who will never dare to take any risks because
at the end of the day what they care most about is keeping their jobs
and perks and fancy offices. Meanwhile the
nothing-to-lose-and-no-FCC-rules Internet stuff is coming at them at
warp speed. Worse yet, the networks have destroyed their own news
operations, which was really the only part of their business where they
were adding value. And this, by the way, is now the huge gaping
opportunity on the Internet. Forget "Ask a Ninja" or "Naked News" or
girls in bikinis on trampolines. Someone with money and brains is going
to do an Internet version of what Ted Turner did with CNN in the early
days of cable. Real content. High quality, good reporters, cheap
cameras out in the field. Streaming news and on-demand, so you could go
back and watch pieces over and over again, or email them to friends.

Just
imagine what you could do in Iraq with twenty ballsy reporters armed
with cheap digital cameras and no network brass to censor them. Imagine
how you could cover the 2008 elections. Imagine the size of the
worldwide audience. Imagine how stunned people would be if, for once,
the people doing the news could actually tell you the truth. Imagine if
the reporters were smart, funny and wise-ass, instead of Ken Doll
robots with strings in the back of their heads. Imagine if you didn't
have to abide by the stupid rules about equal time and fair play.
Imagine if you got a handful of sales guys with TV experience (nobody
over 40) to bring in the advertising. It'll happen. Wait and see.

Ouch!

So, what does this have to do with Ajax? We aren't just writing code that uses XMLHttpRequest objects. We are writing applications with a purpose -- to entertain, inform, sell, assist, create. And as web technologies and usages evolve, we have to make sure our apps evolve right along. People still read books, despite the popularity of TV. People will still use "traditional" webapps, without video, but video will start to play a greater role in more and more online applications. It is time for us to start thinking about how to make our Ajax-enabled apps take advantage of this trend.

Technorati Tags: ajax, video, youtube

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Software Development

Eyespot – AJAX App for Video Editing

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, July 17, 2006 @ 9:00 am

We've see AJAX bringing typical desktop applications like digital image editing (ala Photoshop) to the web. Video editing may seem like an upload too far, but as long as you keep the upload clips small, you can do some useful things with the Beta release of Eyespot. You can upload your clips, tag them, search for other clips. Trim them, assemble them via drag and drop with other clips into a timeline, apply effects and transitions, add a soundtrack and add title slides. You won't be able to edit The Godfather with this thing, but for some quick editing of a camera phone clip, it does the trick.

The application is a mix of multi-page and single-page, i.e., each major function -- selecting a clip, editing a clip, etc. -- is a seperate page, while actions within that page happen in a single-page AJAX manner. Under the hood, the application seems to be based on Rico, a venerable AJAX framework that I've neglected so far (I guess I figured everyone already knew about it).

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Software Development